We were not best friends, but we were in the same clique through middle school and started high school together. This was a friend that I played basketball with for several years. We did school plays together. We went to sleepovers and concerts together. We wrote funny notes in classed or talked on the phone after school. When her sister was was sick and then died of cancer, I was there and I helped her catch up with her school work. When we were awkward pre-teens and teens, she was one of the people I looked to to see how I could act more confident and socially comfortable. Even though we grew apart and lived our own lives after high school, only occasionally talking on the phone or online, she was someone that had made a huge impact on my early life.
Colleen never complained about the fact that her family had to deal with her sister fighting and dying of cancer. She didn't complain about her mom fighting and dying of cancer, and then her dad. She didn't complain about how cancer was so scarily prevalent in her family, it was just the way life was. She would remain positive and crack jokes. She became a nurse so she could help people and families like hers. And when it was her time to fight the same disease that took everyone older than her in her immediate family, she did it again and again because she was a fighter and that's what she did.
The world is not a fair place; if it was Colleen would still be here and healthy. Her spirit will live on in all the lives she touched while she was here. I'm ending this post with a song that I heard for the first time at a sleepover with her; we listened to it on repeat over and over again while we also stayed up too late eating junk food, watching movies, and a brief fiasco where I rode someone's go-kart around a backyard and crashed through some bushes.
In a recent post I said I didn't miss being young all that much. Just today, just a little bit, I do miss being that young.
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